Orphan Train

so I can run the store. We’ll rent a small
     bungalow on a side street several blocks from the Nielsens, four rooms downstairs
     and one up. As it happens—with, perhaps, a little help from Mr. Nielsen, who may have
     mentioned something to the superintendent at a Rotary meeting—the Hemingford School
     is looking for a music teacher. Dutchy also keeps his weekend gig at the Grand in
     Minneapolis, and I go in with him on Friday and Saturday nights to have dinner and
     hear him play. On Sundays, now, he plays the organ at Grace Lutheran, replacing the
     lead-footed organist who was persuaded it was time to retire.
    When I told Mrs. Nielsen that Dutchy had asked me to marry him, she frowned. “I thought
     you said you wanted nothing to do with marriage,” she said. “You’re only twenty. What
     about your degree?”
    “What about it?” I said. “It’s a ring on my finger, not a pair of handcuffs.”
    “Most men want their wives to stay home.”
    When I related this conversation to Dutchy, he laughed. “Of course you’ll get your
     degree. Those tax laws are complicated!”
    Dutchy and I are about as opposite as two people can be. I am practical and circumspect;
     he is impulsive and direct. I’m accustomed to getting up before the sun rises; he
     pulls me back to bed. He has no head at all for math, so in addition to keeping the
     books at the store, I balance our accounts at home and pay our taxes. Before I met
     him, I could count on one hand the times I’d had a drink; he likes a cocktail every
     night, says it relaxes him and will relax me, too. He is handy with a hammer and nail
     from his experience on the farms, but he often leaves projects half finished—storm
     windows stacked in a corner while snow rages outside, a leaky faucet disemboweled,
     its parts all over the floor.
    “I can’t believe I found you,” he tells me over and over, and I can’t believe it either.
     It’s as if a piece of my past has come to life, and with it all the feelings I fought
     to keep down—my grief at losing so much, at having no one to tell, at keeping so much
     hidden. Dutchy was there. He knows who I was. I don’t have to pretend.
    We lie in bed longer than I am used to on Saturday mornings—the store doesn’t open
     until ten, and there’s nowhere Dutchy has to be. I make coffee in the kitchen and
     bring two steaming mugs back to bed, and we spend hours together in the soft early
     light. I am delirious with longing and the fulfillment of that longing, the desire
     to touch his warm skin, trace the sinew and muscle just under the surface, pulsing
     with life. I nestle in his arms, in the nooks of his knees, his body bowed around
     mine, his breath on my neck, fingers tracing my outline. I have never felt like this—slow-witted
     and languorous, dreamy, absentminded, forgetful, focused only on each moment as it
     comes.
    When Dutchy lived on the streets, he never felt as alone, he tells me, as he did growing
     up in Minnesota. In New York the boys were always playing practical jokes on each
     other and pooling their food and clothes. He misses the press of people, the noise
     and chaos, black Model Ts rattling along the cobblestones, the treacly smell of street
     vendors’ peanuts roasting in sugar.
    “What about you—do you ever wish you could go back?” he asks.
    I shake my head. “Our life was so hard. I don’t have many happy memories of that place.”
    He pulls me close, runs his fingers along the soft white underbelly of my forearm.
     “Were your parents ever happy, do you think?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know.”
    Pushing the hair back from my face and tracing the line of my jaw with his finger,
     he says, “With you I’d be happy anywhere.”
    Though it’s just the kind of thing he says, I believe that it’s true. And I know,
     with the newfound clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were
     never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstance.
    O N A MILD AFTERNOON IN EARLY D ECEMBER I AM AT THE STORE going over inventory orders with Margaret, the sharp-eyed accounts manager. Packing
     receipts and forms are all over the floor; I’m trying to decide whether to order more
     ladies’ trousers than last year, and looking at the popular styles in the catalog
     as well as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The radio is on low; swing music is playing, and then Margaret holds her hand up
     and says, “Wait. Did you hear that?” She